Beni

A postcard from
Bolivia - Una tarjeta postal de Bolivia

U 16.472-4: He fumbled out a picture postcard from his
inside pocket, which seemed to be in its way a species of repository, and
pushed it along the table. The printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios.
Beni, Bolivia.

Bloom, Stephen and
others listen with rapt attention to D.B. Murphy, as he tells lurid tales of
his travels on the Red Sea, in China, the Americas, and Russia. Speaking of
South America, he states: “And I seen maneaters
in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A
friend of mine sent me.” (U16.4700). All focus their attention, yet Bloom has
growing suspicion of the accuracy of Murphy’s account: the postcard that the
seaman brings out does not show man-eaters, nor is it from Peru.It is a postcard of a “Choza de Indios” [“an Indian
hut”] in Beni, north-eastern Bolivia.

Of the postcard itself nothing is known,
though commentators often allude to it. While investigating early twentieth-century
postcards for the JoyceImages website, I was
fortunate enough to discover a postcard (undated) illustrating just the image
that Joyce refers to:

Postcard in the writer’s possession

Joyce
gives us more information about the picture itself. It represented:

a group of savage
women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping,
amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside
some primitive shanties of osier. (U
16.475-8)

The
publisher

The back
of the “Choza de Indios” postcard gives the name of the publisher: Arnó Hermanos, i.e. Arnó
Brothers. Arnó Hermanos was an important
publisher in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia and its principal commercial
centre. Arnó owned a bookstore called La
Universitaria that specialised in material of local Bolivian interest. In 1909
they issued a 55-page catalogue listing a large variety of the titles they
carried in stock: these included: “Literature, Sociology, Law, Medicine,
Sciences, Commerce, Arts and Novels by major authors, Theatre etc., etc.”1
In 1913, the size of their catalogue had swelled to 218 pages. They also sold stationery
and were prolific publishers of postcards.

The era

The
beginning of the nineteenth century up to WW1 saw a craze in postcard-sending
and collecting. In 1903, it is estimated than more than 600 million postcards
were handled by the postal system of Great Britain, and an estimated billion in
Germany. No postal figures are available from Bolivia, but the availability of
postmarked cards suggests that Bolivia was similarly swept by the postcard
mania. The same scenes showed up on cards from different publishers, as
black-and-white lithographs, as chromolithographs, or (less commonly) as real
photographs.

The “Choza de Indios” image
is thus also found as a colorised lithograph, slightly less cropped on one of
the edges, and bearing a different legend: “Familia de Indios del Chaco,
Bolivia” and with the imprint of a different publisher, Gonzalex y Medina. It
now identifies (correctly?) the people represented as members of the group of
South American Indians, the Gran Chaco.

Familia de Indios del
Chaco (Bolivia)

The missing message

Bloom
turns over the postcard, and takes particular notice that there was no message.
In 1904 it would not be surprising if the back of a
postcard bore no message. In fact postcards from that era are known as
“undivided back”, with the back strictly dedicated to writing the address of
the recipient. The message, if any, would be written on any available space
around or within the image on the front of the card. Many postcards of that era
in fact bear the printed legend “this side for address only” or, in Bolivia “En
este lado debe escribir unicamenta la direccion” or a variation thereof.

The back of a postcard from Bolivia
(1904)

On March 1, 1907 the US Post Office
allowed private citizens to write on the address side of a postcard, and
postcards printed henceforth had a "divided back", with the left
section being used for a message, and the right reserved for the address. This
is the format still currently in use.

The addressing

The
postcard in Ulysses is addressed to Señor A. Boudin, Galeria Becche,
Santiago, Chile. The text of Ulysses does not explicitly state if the words
were all written out. It is possible, as was sometimes the case, that the word "Señor" was already pre-printed on the card.

Postcard from South America (1904) with
the word “Señor” pre-printed

The
missing man-eaters from Peru

The image below shows a widely circulated postcard of “maneaters”
in Peru. It is not clear if Murphy pulled out of his inside pocket the wrong
postcard, or if this is an indication that he cannot read.